The Kevin Durant July 2016 Scenario: For the Warriors, it’s simplified now–it’d have to be a sign-and-trade, and it’d take a lot

One thing that changed: The Warriors are now the defending NBA champions, which is sorta large.

One thing that hasn’t: They’re still very eager to improve their roster as much as possible and one giant way would be to do everything they can to acquire Durant when he’s scheduled to be a free agent next summer.

It’s not make-or-break, obviously, since they have Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and the rest… but hey, now that they have title-proven players and an MVP and Steve Kerr’s proven system… that can only make the Warriors more appealing to any major player, you’d think.

So…

Another thing that hasn’t changed: Durant is still scheduled to be a free agent next summer, and all the teams that started plotting to get him last year, like the Warriors, are still very, very interested in what might happen next July.

That’s the way the NBA works and any aggressive front office has to plan for it. The Warriors, you might be aware by now, are an extremely aggressive group.

Oh wait, one thing that has definitely changed since last July: The Warriors have logically wrapped up several of their young players to expensive long-term deals–are due to do the same with two others this fall–and that means there is no real way for them to get under the cap-line by $25M and try to sign Durant outright in a year.

That was a possibility last summer… with a lot of sacrifices… but the Warriors invested in the current roster and took themselves out of that option.

I don’t think they’re complaining about the results so far.

Anyway, even without the chance to sign Durant outright, I’d expect the Warriors to try to stay in play for him, but it’d have to be via sign-and-trade, which makes things trickier.

–I’ll get into the salary details later in this item, but Durant will be eligible for something like a $25M salary to start any deal next summer.

–Thanks to their recent deals with Green and Thompson, which both kick-in this season, added to their previous deals with Curry, Andrew Bogut and Andre Iguodala (all three deals go through 2016-17), there’s just no way for the Warriors get to themselves $25M under next summer.

–This is what happens when you have good players who are worth large salaries.

So, it’d have to be sign-and-trade, that’s complicated, and let’s run through the likeliest situation.

For the Warriors to have a shot at Durant next summer…

-First, Durant will have to open negotiations with teams other than OKC.

Nobody knows if that’ll happen, but the whole premise of the Summer of Durant is that he probably will at least explore other possibilities outside of the Thunder.

If he doesn’t, then all of this is meaningless.

-If Durant talks to other teams, then I presume the Warriors will get a meeting.

Joe Lacob and Bob Myers love to aim for the best available talent and they almost always get in the room when they want to in these situations; even before the championship, the Warriors have been able to get across the table from big free agents.

Lacob and Myers got themselves in the room with Dwight Howard in July 2013 when they had just made the playoffs for the first time since 2007 and had no cap space. That was amazing.

Then, when they couldn’t quite put that one together, the Warriors quickly pivoted and landed Andre Iguodala in a sign-and-trade with Denver, again, when they didn’t have any cap space (so it took the large help of Utah, which took Andris Biedrins and Richard Jefferson in a monster salary dump).

-If the Warriors get the meeting, their pitch would be pretty easy to predict: We’re winners, we have Curry and a great foundation, we have Kerr’s offense, we have this great fan base… why wouldn’t you want to join that?

I think Durant or anybody would have to listen to that.
But then comes the hard part–and it’s the part that derailed the Dwight chase:

How do the Warriors put together a sign-and-trade package that 1) OKC will want to do and that will top other bidders, so it has to be valuable; but 2) doesn’t tear up their foundation so that Durant feels like he’s joining a wounded team and the Warriors themselves don’t feel that, too.

Let’s be clear and blunt: Any Warriors sign-and-trade offer for Durant would have to start with Harrison Barnes.

It’d just have to–he plays the same position, he’s young and somebody I’d imagine OKC wouldn’t mind in any deal. But obviously that’d just be a tiny part of it; the Warriors would have to add much more.

How about Barnes plus Kevon Looney? Not nearly enough. And the money wouldn’t be nearly enough, either. The Warriors would have to add a lot of money to make it work per CBA rules.

Could anybody beat that offer? That might be really tough to top, if it goes on the table.

I’m NOT saying the Warriors would make this offer; I don’t know what they do at that point. They’d probably put together several other proposals that don’t include Klay, at least initially.

Important points: The Warriors love Klay. They didn’t trade him for Kevin Love and then gave him that huge $69M deal last summer, on the bet that he’d be just as good as he turned out to be last season.

He’s a great partner for Curry. That’s a championship-winning backcourt. All of that is understood. There is no way the Warriors would go into any Klay trade talks lightly–that’s PROVEN by last summer.

But if Klay is the piece that gets you Durant, theoetically?

Kevin Durant plus Curry plus Draymond would be an all-time trio, capable of obliterating the West several times over, I’d think.

Yes, I can see Lacob and Myers piling everything on the table in the chase to make that happen.

Here’s a stat for you: Durant, who turns 27 in September, is only 16 months older than Klay.

—What would the Warriors have to top, theoretically?

* Oklahoma City can pay him the most, still has Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka, and kept Enes Kanter (though that one is a questionable move).

OKC doesn’t need to do anything wild to keep Durant, it just has to be good enough for him to believe that staying is worthwhile.

The Thunder just fired Scott Brooks and hired Billy Donovan, so we’ll see how that works out.

So OKC is the favorite to keep Durant just because he doesn’t seem like a player who’ll leave just to leave and OKC has been a good home for him.

But if Durant gets wanderlust…

* Washington, his hometown team, can open just enough space next summer to offer to Durant, and they have good young talent already on board, with John Wall and Bradley Beal.

Plus the Wizards are in the East, which makes things easier in the playoffs, if that’s something Durant wants.

If Durant decides he’s leaving the Thunder, the Wizards would seem like his next top option.

This logically is the team the Warriors would probably have to beat… and it’s a big thing that Washington would not have to do anything with OKC–the Wizards can sign Durant outright.

The Warriors would have to do it by enticing Durant AND the Thunder with a sign-and-trade proposal.

But if Durant sees he can win multiple titles in the Bay Area and maybe doesn’t quite see that in Washington…

* Dallas. No DeAndre Jordan means tons of cap space for next summer. But it also means this is not exactly a team with a championship foundation for Durant to join.

* The Lakers. They have a wide-open cap, even if they re-sign Kobe Bryant again; they have interesting young players–D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle.

But is this where Durant feels he can win a championship?

Other teams might come into play, obviously, some with enough cap space to sign him outright, some would have figure out a sign-and-trade situation.

This won’t be easy for the Warriors; but they got close enough to Dwight a few years ago to get everybody’s attention, and now they have the trophy plus Curry and Kerr… and the willingness to throw everything they can at the player they’ve always wanted.

That’s the set up. Now only about 11 months to go. Oh, and there’s an entire season to play, also.

–The details of the Warriors’ payroll situation heading into next July….

After the new $82M deal with Green, the Warriors have about $75.5M committed to eight players for 2016-17, if you count the qualifying offers for Barnes and Festus Ezeli, and I do count them.

If the Warriors agree to extensions with Barnes and Ezeli this fall, which is expected, those numbers for 2016-17 will go way up for
them.

But I’m being conservative, as usual, with these future payroll estimates so I’ll only count the QO’s for the Summer of Durant accounting.

That’s also not counting the $5.8M team option for Shaun Livingston for 2016-17, which I believe is very safe to assume the Warriors will pick up.

If you add Livingston’s option, that pods the team’s realistic July 2016 commitment up to $81.3M for nine players, which already takes them very close to the projected 2016-17 salary cap of near $90M.

And the Warriors’ number only remains that low if the team adds no more future salary from now until next July; point of fact, I think they will do something here or there just in the course of doing business.

(For instance, they could sign James Michael McAdoo to a new deal beyond his current minimum salary for this season.)

The salary cap is up to $70M this season and will continue to explode in the next few years, but it’s still projected to be somewhere around $89M in July 2016.

So, with the Warriors sitting at a realistic $81.3M already committed for 2016-17, unless they do a serious salary strip down (which they won’t), the Warriors are not going to be able to get anywhere near $25M under the cap by July 2016.

Nor should they try. They just won the championship, they have good young players they need to keep and they have a title to defend this season.

The Warriors won a title in between that piece and this one, so obviously you never know.

Some of it still holds up, some of it most certainly does not. The gist remains: The Warriors–like any aggressive team–have had their
eyes on next July and No. 35 for a long time and some part of every move since then has had some relation to a possible Durant chase.

Back then, I needed a number to fill in for Draymond Green’s salary this season and I put down $6M. Turns out that’s only $8M low.

Oh well, that’s what happens when you project.

Things change. But the Summer of Durant keeps us all in some of the same old places.